Russell Wilkinson talks to Catherine Camus about Albert Camus’ The First Man [Cliquez ici pour la version française de cette interview] In January 1960, the French writer and philosopher Albert Camus was killed in a car crash along with his friend and publisher, Michel Gallimard. Recovered from the wreckage of the crash was the unfinished […]
Tibor Fischer: Under The Frog: The Fischer King
Cliff Taylor gets a rare interview with the reclusive Tibor Fischer The scene: a typically wintry Wednesday afternoon. Upstairs at The Lift in Brighton’s Queen Road, some whey-faced literary types are gathered around a table for a seminar of sorts. Their rapt attention is focused upon The Writer in their midst, a slightly grizzled […]
Gwyneth Jones : Phoenix Cafe : Phoenix Rising
Chris Mitchell hears about the strange truth of science fiction from Gwyneth Jones “I’m in a fairly lonely position as a British woman writing science fiction,” says Brighton-based novelist Gwyneth Jones, but then, it’s always lonely at the top. Her new novel Phoenix Café has recently received widespread acclaim from the national press, which […]
Samuel Beckett: Beyond Biography: The Last Modernist by Anthony Cronin and Damned To Fame by James Knowlson :
Despite two recent authorative biographies, Stephen Mitchelmore argues that Beckett remains an enigma It has not been easy assimilating Beckett into our culture. While his mentor James Joyce made with ease the familiar journey from public outrage and bewilderment to universal love and admiration, Beckett, seven years after his death, remains as distant as ever. […]
Douglas Coupland : Polaroids From The Dead : From Fear To Eternity
Chris Mitchell emails Douglas Coupland about fame, the future and the problem with American chocolate Douglas Coupland is not your average novelist. Since the publication of Generation X in 1991, he has become one of this decade’s most important writers, thanks to his unerring ability to capture the zeitgeist of young middle class America in […]
Jeff Noon : Automated Alice : Fairytales From The Future
Bethan Roberts talks to Jeff Noon about his new novel Automated Alice What’s really nice about Jeff Noon is that, firstly, I can use a word like “nice” about him (not, I expect, a word most cyberpunks would be comfortable with), and secondly, beyond the street-level-city-techno-punkiness that precedes him in the form of his […]
X20: Richard Beard
SPIKE presents an exclusive extract from this hilarious cigarette obsessed debut novel DAY 1 DR WILLIAM BARCLAY, born 7 March 1936, died 3 March 1994, age 57. Mysterium Magnum. The principle of all generation is separation, he used to say. Distract your mind. Take up a new hobby. Occupy your hands. He said that the […]
Iain Banks : Whit and Excession: Getting Used To Being God
Chris Mitchell meets the relentlessly imaginative Iain.M Banks Twelve years and fourteen books since the publication of his debut novel The Wasp Factory, Iain Banks has become one of Britain’s most prominent and prolific writers. Whether writing mainstream novels as plain “Iain Banks” or science fiction under his ubiquitous “Iain M. Banks” nom-de-plume, Banks […]
Bruce Chatwin’s travel writing: In Search Of The Miraculous
Spike on the enduring enigma of Bruce Chatwin’s travel writing Bruce Chatwin was a truly singular voice in British travel writing, and whose silence is now all too apparent. Since his untimely death in 1989 of what was described at the time as a rare Chinese disease (but which was later admitted to be AIDS), […]
The Significance Of Names In The Fiction Of Martin Amis, Vladimir Nabokov, John Kennedy Toole, Joseph Heller, Samuel Beckett, John Updike, Will Self, Umberto Eco : Waiting For Go.Dot
Chris Hall on the significance of names in fiction and film The importance of names in literature has nowhere been more typified than in recent attempts to pin down the elusive etymology of Beckett’s Godot. Following that farrago you can be sure that the name ‘Godot’ is missing from any parental ‘Book Of Names’ (although […]
Julian Rathbone: Intimacy
Naomi Delap I feel sorry for writers these days. It’s so terribly difficult to be iconoclastic, what with the Irvine Welsh backlash just about to break and that sinking feeling you get whenever blurb describes anything as remotely Tarantinoesque. There are no new subjects to write about, and any attempt at novelty eventually and inevitably […]
Richard Powers: Galatea 2.2
Adam Baron Richard Powers’ fictional hero (also titled Richard Powers) returns from years in the Netherlands to the University that gave him his love of Literature. The author of four novels, Powers is to be the Humanist in residence in the newly built cognitive science centre, a labyrinth of laboratories and computer networks. Powers does […]
Andrei Codrescu: The Blood Countess
Adam Baron When I was teaching English in the Slovak Republic a few years ago, I was told the story of Elizabeth Bathory, “the blood sucking Countess of Cahtice,” a town in Slovakia which used to be part of Hungary. Countess Elizabeth, in a bizarre twist to the droit de seigneur, was alleged to have […]
Mary Zuravleff: The Frequency Of Souls
Naomi Delap The Grand Affaire is ever the stuff great fiction is made of. Revelling in the cathartic effect of our protagonist’s roller-coaster ride of emotion, we gasp as the first illicit coupling finally takes place, groan as the inevitable disillusionment sets in, heave a sigh of pleasurable anguish when the tale ends in an […]
Irvine Welsh: Ecstasy: Three Chemical Romances
Chris Mitchell With the phenomenal success of Trainspotting (in all its various literary, filmic and dramatic guises), Irvine Welsh has moved from semi-literary obscurity to the centre of contemporary English writing. Trainspotting was one of those books that provoked people who hated reading to devour its three-hundred plus pages. This never happened with Martin Amis. […]